SOURCE: Bonjour, Adrien. “Bastinado for the Bastard?” English Studies 45 (1964): 169-76.

In the following essay, Bonjour defends his thesis that Lord Faulconbridge, the Bastard, should be viewed as the dramatic hero of King John.

This is not the place to re-open the much debated question of the hero in King John, nor even to take up the cudgels in favour of my interpretation of the Bastard's rôle in the vast perspective of the play. I merely propose to examine some of the reasons which led Mr. Honigmann to reduce the Bastard's part to that of a mere commentator standing “outside the inner framework” of the tragedy, and hence to reject him as a possible hero even in the fifth act.¹ For convenience I shall first sum up the case against the Bastard by listing Mr. Honigmann's main arguments.

1) To make the Bastard's “subordinate position crystal clear, Shakespeare has...